mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Gardener, homebrewer, bread baker and hot sauce maker. Assister with Django Debug Toolbar.
Djangonaut Space | Django Steering Council | Django Commons
Being a week out from #PyConUS is simultaneously too much time and too little.
Also, if you didn't catch it, @elthenerd@fosstodon.org did a Q&A with the keynote speakers. I was feeling pretty energetic when I wrote my responses 😅
https://pycon.blogspot.com/2026/04/asking-key-questions-q-with-pycon-us.html
Hot sauce day! Fermented some jalapeños and garlic for a few months. Finally got around to bottling it. Used 75% apple cider vinegar with 25% rice wine vinegar.
I was lucky enough to present my keynote, "Contributing to the Django community" at @djangoconafrica@fosstodon.org last year. I finally wrote up the talk as a blog post! If you're curious about contributing to open-source and want to learn where to get involved in the Django community, check it out.
https://www.better-simple.com/django/2026/04/06/contributing-to-the-django-community/
I really enjoyed this #Django blog post from @rodbv@pynews.com.br
https://dev.to/rodbv/djangonaut-diaries-week-6-charting-the-unknown-unknowns-of-a-pr-3ba3
He perfectly captures the difficulties of a new contributor looking to add a new feature and the existing contributors evaluating a feature request. There's also a great section on comparing the difference in environment of contributing to Django compared to a job. It's worth a read.
Are you curious about using the new Django Tasks feature in production? Djangonaut Space has been running it for a few months now. It's been a great experience to use!
https://www.better-simple.com/django/2026/05/06/using-django-tasks-in-production/
Have you been looking for ways to level up as a Django developer?
https://www.better-simple.com/django/2026/04/21/who-is-helping-you-level-up-as-a-django-dev/
I started a new business back in February, but did so with a "quiet" roll out. Here's where I start being a bit louder. Whether you want mentorship, coaching or tutoring, I'd like to help you.
Side note, it's a big win for me to be able to work with four people already.
I'm pretty excited about this summer. I went for a hike today and was outside for a good 2.5 hours. Zero allergy issues. Pollen counts were high enough that this probably would have had me blowing my nose frequently. I'm starting my third year of wyndly treatment and it seems to be having much more of an effect. The final test will be how may and June go.
Here's an overly excited Roland to start your Monday.
I missed last week, but no worries. This week's #LunchTalk makes up for it. It's from @josh@social.joshthomas.dev from #DjangoCon US 2024. It's his talk "An Opinionated Guide to Modern Django Forms".
Give it a watch to learn about Django's form improvements!
https://www.better-simple.com/lunch-talks/2026/05/05/opinionated-guide-to-modern-django-forms/
First piece of swag is complete for #PyCon US!
#Django Commons has added some new admins. Please say hello!
https://django-commons.org/blog/2026/04/21/please-welcome-our-new-admins/
It's that time of the @djangonaut@indieweb.social session where folks start sharing their recaps and I'm super excited about it. Daniel here has a excellent one!
Hey #Django folks, past DSF President @amakarudze@fosstodon.org could use our help. She's looking for people in the OSS community, industry, and the academic community understand how developers perceive vulnerabilities in dependencies and their potential to expose systems to supply-chain attacks.
For more info, including how to reach Anna, see: https://pychronicles.com/post_detail/calling-for-research-participants-from-django-laravel-ruby-on-rails-nextjs-and-spring-boot-communities/
I joined @kjaymiller@mastodon.social on his live stream series, "Elephant in the room" where we discussed a package we built for #Django on top of the #PostgreSQL Anonymizer extension.
If you are interested in faking/anonymizing data in your staging/dev environments, give it a look and let us know what you think!
https://www.better-simple.com/django/2026/03/18/django-security-label/
Finally got around to updating my getting started contributing to #Django post, with recent talks from @sarahboyce@mastodon.social, @cliffordgama@mastodon.social and Jacob. I ended up removing the older GSoC pages because there's already a lot of links and people can probably guess the pattern after 3 😁
https://www.better-simple.com/django/2024/12/25/getting-started-contributing-django/
I've been diving into #FastAPI recently and wanted to use Railway. I didn't follow the defined guide explicitly and wrote up the differences here.
https://www.better-simple.com/fastapi/2026/04/27/deploying-the-example-fastapi-app-on-railway/
The Django Steering Council is looking for community feedback on the new technical governance. Read more here: https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/apr/16/new-technical-governance-request-for-community-fee/
There were a lot of changes, but the one I'm most excited about is the new steering council eligibility requirements. Give it a look and let us know what you think on the forum.
Last year at #DjangoCon US, Lisa Dusseault showed off the data pipeline framework, Phaser. I enjoyed this talk because it made me realize I should revisit how data processing in my project should work.
https://www.better-simple.com/lunch-talks/2026/04/10/phaser-the-django-of-data-pipelines/
This talk is worth watching if you're interested in:
- Contributing to Phaser
- Data pipeline frameworks
- Learning how to approach building your own framework
Protip: Don't join the zoom for your afternoon meeting before your morning google meet meeting, then try to figure out why Meet can't get permission to use your camera.
Tomorrow's #LunchTalk is "Building maintainable #Django projects: the difficult teenage years" by Alex Henman
I think it's worth watching if you're:
- Interested in real-world solutions to web app challenges
- Working with a web app experiencing growing pains
https://www.better-simple.com/lunch-talks/2026/03/25/building-maintainable-django-projects/
The COOSS law: The further you dive into community organizing in open source, the more communication platforms you end up joining.
Or as @webology@mastodon.social may put it, "Do you want to buy nitro? ⛽🔋"
This looks pretty interesting! The integration of pydantic and svcs is neat. I like the ulid ids too.
@treyhunner@mastodon.social I've really been enjoying the book recommendation "Factfulness". Good call!
So... adding more work and burden to the community organizers?
💯 I think that's right. Creating a sustainable culture means investing time in making it more sustainable.
If we're maxed out in time for that community, then we should rework our priorities to make sustainability a higher priority. Or put another way, do less of other things.
Which is easier said than done because those other things tend to provide more dopamine. 😁